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Hard/Not Hard To Believe It Happens This Way [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-25
On Feb. 12, 2025, three things happened:
• 9:43 am The House budget blueprint was released, suggesting a possible $880 billion in Medicaid cuts.
• 10:00 am 17 minutes later, Marjorie Taylor Greene's DOGE Subcommittee met. They reviewed a 2024 Government Accountability Office report (initiated by Democrats under Joe Biden) which estimated $2.7 trillion in improper payments, across the entire federal govt. from 2003 – 2023. “Improper” includes bureaucratic or paperwork errors in otherwise legitimate payments, and yes, some fraud.
The words “foreign” and “overseas” do not appear in the report.
• 1:33 pm In a White House press briefing, “Real America's Voice” correspondent (and MTG's boyfriend) Brian Glenn cited her DOGE Subcommittee meeting, then stated that she and her staff had “discovered $2.7 trillion in improper payments to Medicare and Medicaid, overseas to people who should not have gotten it.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene did not “discover” this, and it is NOT what the GAO report says.
This was not what the report OR the committee said, but White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt seemingly endorsed it. Neither of them produced any evidence, and no one asked for any. This was the sole source of the “$2.7 trillion in Medicaid/Medicare was sent overseas” story. Glenn's statement got picked up and shared online, including by Elon Musk, for weeks.
Again, DOGE didn’t “discover” it, and the GAO report DID NOT say any of those things.
This dominated the online discussion about Medicaid, NOT the actual plan to cut it. A 30-second statement by a known Trump partisan in a WH press briefing was all it took to distract many Americans from the fact that Republicans were going to take away their health care. That prediction proved to be true when the GOP-run House passed their budget in the dead of night, May 22nd. It cut 100s of billions of dollars from Medicaid AND Medicare.
In the age of Trump, none of this will come as a huge surprise to anyone. But it still has to rank as one of the more egregious examples of fake news (deliberate lies and disinformation) covering for unpopular policy actions.
Side note: anyone who GENUINELY wants to address waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending, has to recognize that this willingness to misrepresent the facts, has made it harder to actually do so.
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